Do you remember the first movie that you hated? As little kids, most of us probably weren’t all that discriminating in what we’d watch on tv or in the movie theater, I know I wasn’t. When we were all under ten years old, my parents dragged me and my sisters to see The Last Emperor – a three-hour subtitled movie set in China. I remember being confused as hell as to what was going on, but I’m pretty sure I watched the whole thing and would never have said that I hated the movie. No, for a movie to break through into the brain of a child who is ready to be entertained by nearly anything, and make them so bored and unhappy that they want to leave the theater, that takes a special level of awfulness. *Batteries Not Included was that movie for me (yes, there’s an asterisk in the title). Here’s IMDB’s plot summary:
A group of tenants in an apartment block are being forced to move out so that it can be demolished. The tenants are reluctant to move, so the developers hire a local gang to ‘persuade’ them to leave. Fortunately, visiting alien mechanical life-forms come to town. When they befriend the tenants, the aliens use their extraterrestrial abilities to defeat the developers.
How the hell they got Jessica Tandy to sign on to that script is beyond me. It was on tv this past Monday and it is every bit as awful as I remembered. Watch the trailer if you don’t believe me, and tell me the movie doesn’t look like it was the result of Steven Spielberg losing some kind of very high-stakes bet.
If you’ve got nominees for the first movie you truly hated, let’s see them in the comments.
